One study asked 1,443 Twitter users to rank 43,738 tweets on whether they were worthy of reading. 36% of the tweets were worth reading, 25% were worth reading and 39% were neutral. Their findings found that the tweets most worthy of reading were: clear, didn’t overuse hashtags, and did not retweet conversations.

Percent of tweets worth reading when they have the following qualities:

Funny, exciting: 36%

Self-promotion: 36%

Questions to followers: 35%

Information or news: 33%

Opinions: 30%

Catching up: 27%

Presence: 20%

Another study measured the amount of engagement, replies and retweets of tweets based on what times they were posted, what days, and other factors.

They found:

Weekends are best for tweets

7 AM to 8 PM is best for Twitter

8 PM to 7 AM is best for Facebook

Tweet 4 times a day or less

Add links

Include two or less hashtags

Use images

Engagement on twitter is 17% higher on weekends

Ask followers to retweet

Use less than 100 characters

Measuring effectiveness of social media marketing

1. structural analysis
– uses parameters such as the number of followers, number of retweets and number of mentions to score influence of tweet

2. Content analysis
– why and how do people retweet
– use of URLs and hashtags affects the number of retweets
– users prefer sharing information and random thoughts to status updates